Room For Manoeuvre Research Articles

'I was like a one-man band': the theory and practice of national development experts' work at the messy-middle

Despite their importance to project outcomes, the work of individuals who occupy the meso-level of international development projects at the interfaces between an ever-growing number of actor groups is often poorly reflected on. Using four typically disparate bodies of literature (brokers and translators, street level bureaucracy, policy entrepreneurs, and institutional bricolage), I analyze how the work of national development experts (NDEs) at the meso-level influences how project intentions become social realities that reshape local lives. Normative and personal-professional motivations underpin NDEs' work at the messy-middle, encouraging them to work in a 'bottom-up' manner and to formally and informally create room for maneuver for all actors involved, drawing on relational skills and negotiating and utilizing multiple aspects of their individual identities. NDEs also work through conscious institutional bricolage, which they try to manage formally through contracts and informally through relationship-building, to integrate the project with the social environments in which it is being implemented. The analysis helps address key questions in existing meso-level actor literatures. It also shows that understanding meso-level work can facilitate improved understandings of how development projects move from intentions to social effects, which is a key concern for political ecology. I conclude by proposing that critical reflection could be a suitable methodology for assessing meso-level practice as it allows meso-level work to be discussed and learnt from without fully removing the spaces of informality and discretion that are vital to its success.

Whose Margin of Appreciation? Analyzing Its Significance in European Human Rights Jurisprudence

In legal theory but also in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, there is an undisputed consensus that the margin of appreciation represents a certain “room for manoeuvre” that the Court grants to national authorities when assessing their behaviour before it is prepared to find that a violation of rights has indeed occurred. Moreover, it is often argued in legal theory that the margin of appreciation is a method of interpreting the Convention. Although these claims are widely accepted and well-founded, in recent years, various authors in legal theory have increasingly put forward assertions that the margin of appreciation has another “hidden” role in the Court's case law, namely, that it is a judicial tool through which the Court increasingly tries to create room for manoeuvre in decision-making. In this paper, the author will build on this theory of the margin of appreciation as a judicial tool aimed at giving the Court room for manoeuvre. The goal of the paper is to test the thesis on the margin of appreciation as a judicial tool aimed at leaving a certain manoeuvring space for the Court itself in decision-making, using the method of conceptual analysis and the case study method. Following that, the author will approach the analysis of factors that provide an explanation for why the idea of leaving manoeuvring space for the Court itself in decision-making and argumentation may be appealing to the Court.

The Paris Salon des Médecins (1909–1939): Amateur Art and Professional Culture

Abstract This article presents the initial results of a research project on the history of physician-artists in the twentieth century, at the intersection between the history of amateur art and the history of the medical profession. In 1909, the Paris “Salon des médecins” (Physicians’ Salon) was created, following in the footsteps of other so-called “corporative” amateur art exhibitions dedicated to particular professional groups. The Salon’s activities also played a role in debates about the physician’s professional identity, especially regarding the role of the humanities and the arts in medical training and practice. This article retraces the history of the Salon des médecins, from its inception through to the rise of “medical humanism” in 1930s France. After outlining the context in which the Salon was founded, the article firstly analyses the social group constituted by the exhibitors, examining, on the one hand, its representativeness within the field of health professionals, and on the other, its representations of the physician-artist as the new face of the humanist doctor. The article also explores the individual case of Raimond Sabouraud, examining the ways in which he embodied the ideal of the physician-artist and the room for manoeuvre that this ideal allowed.

A Gradient of More and Less Demanding Impositions: Reflections on the Special Issue on Resistance

People resist various kinds of imposition, which can be ranged along a gradient—impositions from those heavily entitled to make them, along to those where the matter is more balanced, to where the imposed-upon person is the one who has the greater rights. The articles in this Special Issue cover the whole range, from the police officer issuing bald imperatives, through to a tutor trying to help a student with their essay. In one case the resistor is may have little room for maneuver without incurring cost; in the other, the resistor will be given more latitude. The signal characteristic of the analysis throughout is a very close attention to the actual exchange of talks between the two parties: it is there that conversation analysis reveals the intricacy with which imposition is attempted and resistance succeeds or fails.

Low Emission Areas vs. Urban Congestion Taxes

In most European cities, urban transport is responsible for the majority of energy consumption, the emission of pollutants into the air, traffic congestion and noise, and in the last century we have faced an increase in urban mobility and a growing tendency to use private, as opposed to public transport, and an increase in the number of vehicles. The strictly private economic rationality of citizens explains this trend and the market will regulate it, albeit with largely avoidable social costs of congestion. Supply policies, that is, more and more extensive routes, are those that have been carried out almost exclusively traditionally, but these have been insufficient and, paradoxically, have even caused effects contrary to those intended, in the light of the state of empirical experiences, not to mention the waste of public resources that may be destined for more socially profitable alternative uses. As a consequence, where there is the greatest room for manoeuvre for urban transport policy is found in demand, that is, in the use of available means of urban transport. In recent decades, a good number of partial demand measures have been tried in European cities, such as subsidies for buses and subways, ecological fuels, car-sharing, smart cards, road-pricing, park-pricing, one day without a car, distribution of departure times at the end of the working day, etc. This paper focuses on Road Pricing, pointing out the experiences of the cities in which it has been put into practice but, mainly, examining its economic foundation and the design that should inspire collaboration in terms of achieving a more efficient and socially equitable urban mobility model. Keywords: Taxes; Automobiles; Highways; Payments; Urban congestion; Polluters.

Alternative practices to pesticide use in the Guadeloupe banana belt: Do biophysical constraints limit agroecological transitions?

CONTEXTIn the French West Indies, the banana sector has made a transition from systems heavily reliant on synthetic inputs to more agroecological systems. However, despite abundant literature on the performance of these systems, few studies have described the mechanisms involved in this transition at the level of individual farms. OBJECTIVEThis article aims to understand the drivers of diverse individual agroecological transitions on banana farms in Guadeloupe towards alternative practices to the use of pesticides with a specific focus on the role of biophysical constraints at territorial scale. METHODThe methodological approach was based on three complementary steps to grasp the spatio-temporal determinants of these transitions: (1) a mapping of biophysical constraints on the scale of a territory spanning 2510 ha of farmland, (2) a mapping of the land use changes between 2010 and 2019 at the plot scale over 1680 plots, and (3) an evaluation of the agroecological transition over ten years of 20 farms located in four previously determined constraint zones. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSWe show that some farms in the study area face multiple constraints linked to biophysical factors (sigatoka pressure and slope), and that there are links between these various constraints and land use changes (e.g. abandonment, diversification and maintenance of banana production). A more detailed analysis of the farms shows the emergence of five transition types over the last ten years: farms with a weak transition, farms with a weak transition despite having governance over their productive resources, farms with a moderate transition, farms with an organic-based agroecological transitions, and farms with a strong agroecological transition. The biophysical constraints of these farms affected these transitions, however changes in legislation or access to organic certification also supported changes. There is room for progress to intensify the transition of these systems, but this requires specific recommendations for these different types. SIGNIFICANCEThe mixed method used in this study is helpful to diagnose changes in time and space of farms in agroecological transition and assess their real room for maneuver.

The ambivalent trajectory of the German gender regime: Are female breadwinner families an indicator of a shift towards a public gender regime?

There seems to be some evidence that Germany is turning from being a ‘domestic’ to a ‘public’ gender regime. The extension of public childcare, increasing female labour market participation rates and the introduction of gender quotas, among other changes, point to this development. However, a detailed analysis reveals an ambivalent and even contradictory trajectory. This development can only be understood by applying an intersectional perspective and looking at families with different socioeconomic backgrounds, class, and gender. By focusing on family households in which women are the main earners, this paper illustrates changes and stability in different domains and contributes to the understanding of the German gender regime's trajectory. On the basis of a qualitative study conducted in West and East Germany, the article shows that many women who are the main breadwinners in their families are in this position not because of modernised gender relations and by their own choice, but ‘involuntarily’, because of their partners' weak labour market position and increasing pressure within the German welfare state to earn their own living and contribute to covering the needs of the household through gainful employment. Many female-breadwinner families do not live reversed, modernised gender roles, but face an above-average risk for poverty and have little room for manoeuvre. Political and economic factors, as well as norms (in the domains of polity, economy and civil society), help to explain these findings. We see mainly neoliberal, activation policies directed at households with low resources, whereas the institutional framework for households with higher incomes has remained relatively stable. The results of the study show that dual-earner households are not necessarily progressive and dual earning is a poor indicator of a gender regime change.

Going Up in Smoke: Tobacco and Government Policy in the Age of Austerity, 1945-50.

This article examines the Attlee government's performance as a crisis manager in relation to tobacco policy in the years prior to the publication in 1950 of research linking smoking and cancer. Health concerns played no role in tobacco policy before 1950, and the government hoped more teenagers would take up smoking and pay tobacco duty. Tobacco took on added significance as an economic issue because policy-makers had so little room for manoeuvre. Their task was to balance the desire of consumers to smoke as much as they liked at a reasonable price, the exchequer's need to raise revenue from tobacco duties, and the imperative to conserve scarce dollars. Tobacco was an economic and financial rather than a health issue in the late 1940s and the authorities juggled competing demands creditably. This article examines previously neglected but important aspects of the histories of tobacco and of the Attlee government's economic policies.

Women's agency during the COVID-19 pandemic in the absence of male migrants: changing gender roles and social relations

This article is an account of the expression of women’s agency during the COVID-19 pandemic in the absence of male migrants and the subsequent changes in gender roles and social relations in a patriarchal Muslim society in rural Bangladesh. In doing so, the study explores the patterns of local and transborder networks of women during the pandemic and their strategies for household survival amid hardship. The study is based on 25 in-depth interviews, 10 life history interviews and 3 informal group discussions with women and men from migrant and returned migrant households. The findings of the study indicate that although there is no significant change in the roles of women in extended or joint households, some women in nuclear households are engaged in income-generating activities and are active for the survival of household members during the COVID-19 pandemic whereas in some exceptional cases, women consider the time as an opportunity to increase the household income by applying their intelligence and wisdom. The study follows intersectional and post-structural approaches and suggests that the pandemic period creates a situation, in which some women in migrant households get the advantages to widen their room for maneuver within patriarchal social codes. The study thus contributes to the field of migration and feminism

Smallholder Participation in Modernising Agri-Food Value Chains in Thailand: The Role of Traditional Markets

The strategic focus of food retailers on stringent product requirements and the logistical management of fresh produce from farm to shelf have often been seen as raising barriers for smallholders, thus leading to the exclusion of resource-constrained farmers. Our study contributes to research on the inclusion of smallholders in modern agri-food value chains and on the integration of their perspectives in studies of dynamics in value chains through a combined qualitative and quantitative exploration of vegetable-producing smallholders in northern Thailand. We find that smallholders are not excluded from Thailand’s modern agri-food value chains, regardless of their household assets, but are instead integrated through traditional structures. To some extent, they do have room for manoeuvre in selecting different marketing channels and some bargaining power. Traditional markets can be very important for linking smallholders to modern agri-food value chains, but limited knowledge exchange, structural challenges in gaining access to certification and product differentiation all reduce the possibilities for upgrading. We emphasise the importance of viewing smallholders as active navigators within value chains and of understanding their motivations in making use of different sales channels in order to understand the complexities of their realities while not overlooking the power structures within value chains.

The many beginnings of Operation Sophia: international law and literature in the governance of the EU

Abstract Borrowing from literary studies, this article revisits a series of interviews conducted with EU officials who narrated many beginnings of an EU military counter-migrant smuggling operation. The article asks what these many beginnings do together. It argues they together constitute a mode of (un)governance geared towards leaving open maximum room for manoeuvre.

More control–less agency slack? Principal control and the risk of agency slack in international organizations

AbstractPrincipal‐agent theorizing is based on the idea of a linear inverse relationship between principal control and agency slack: the higher the control over the agent, the less likely is the agent to slack. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by explicitly taking the varying nature of agents into account. While control may reduce the agent's room for maneuver, it does not explain the extent to which different agents are inclined to put efforts in circumventing these obstacles. Focusing on international organizations (IOs), we measure member states' as principals' control over IO administrations as their agents as well as the latter's intrinsic propensity to slack across eight major IOs. The analysis shows that low control by the principal is not necessarily associated with run‐away agents, whereas high control is not necessarily associated with servant‐like agents. The assumed control–slack relationship can thus be distorted and determining an ideal level of control is not possible without considering the agent's entrepreneurialism.

Domestic sources of China’s wolf-warrior diplomacy: individual incentive, institutional changes and diversionary strategies

Many China observers have commented that Beijing is harsh and assertive on diplomatic occasions. By publicizing the nationalistic rhetoric and moves in internal propaganda, the PRC aims to please domestic audiences. This article examines China’s practices of ‘wolf-warrior diplomacy’, explicates the rationale behind it, and provides three plausible explanations. Firstly, the individualist explanation highlights the personal motives of ‘wolf-warrior’ diplomats. However, wolf-warrior diplomacy is not the common practice of Chinese diplomats, as most Chinese diplomats, unlike these wolf-warriors, remain conservative, taking an orthodox approach to their duties. Secondly, the institutional explanation presents a potential conflict between propaganda and diplomacy agencies in conducting waixuan (external propaganda, overseas-targeted propaganda: 外宣). I elaborate on how the changing working doctrines of waixuan have encouraged wolf-warrior diplomacy. Finally, the strategic explanation highlights how Beijing diverts the popular attention away from its domestic issues and towards ‘external threats’ and rallies popular support at home by ‘talking tough’ and ‘blaming others’. The diversionary use of assertive diplomacy also allows Beijing to avoid publicizing its policy failures, buy more time and room for manoeuvre, and plan tactical reforms while preserving its fundamental political system. I also argue that the wolf-warrior diplomacy is more of ad hoc response to perceived geopolitical risk in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic than a well-crafted strategy.

Studying Moscow’s Coercive Campaign Against Norway

Norway’s geopolitical position as both a neighbour of Russia and a member of NATO places it at the forefront of Moscow’s self-assertive and aggressive foreign and security policy. However, Norway’s NATO membership reduces Russia’s room for manoeuvre to actions below the threshold of armed conflict. In this article, Runar Spansvoll examines how Russia has made use of such aggressive and coercive sub-threshold activities in the political, information and military domains between 2014–23 in a campaign to compel Oslo to comply with its foreign and security policy objectives.◼

Minimal resilience and insurgent conflict: qualitative analysis of the resilience process in six primary health centres in central Mali

BackgroundIn the context of universal health coverage in the Sahel, the study focuses on primary health centres and the difficulties of their implementation in the context of insurgency conflicts in...

Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973 by Ayala Levin

Reviewed by: Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973 by Ayala Levin Kwaku Nti Levin, Ayala. Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Ayala Levin projects the otherwise obscure role of Israeli technical aid amid the crucial African political elite efforts in preferring other countries as alternatives to erstwhile colonial powers in the development of the built environment across the continent. This kind of collaboration that amounted to a transgression of [End Page 215] old colonial hierarchies thrived on official Israeli overtures preceding African independence much to the objection of Britain. Accordingly, Levin points out that Israeli officials offered the emerging African governments "the services of the Israeli construction company Solel Boneh, as well as those of other governmental companies … a cooperative organization established in 1920 that laid the foundation for the Israeli state's institutional infrastructure and political leadership in its first decade of statehood" (2). Levin consequently challenges prevailing understanding of development discourses as homogeneous with the technocrats thereof as incorporeal. Again, this book draws attention to oblivious issues in the broader development scholarship as the author introduces the trope of competition. She avers that "in the competition over development aid in Africa, incited by decolonization and the global Cold War, new centers of knowledge production emerged and, with them, the opportunity for African governments to negotiate with various aid donors and choose the forms of aid … the competition over aid allowed room for sophisticated maneuvering even between countries associated with the same bloc" (3). These manipulations in this increasingly competitive development market saw old and new international actors joggling with each other, tearing down colonial monopolies as the latter acted as proxies for the new superpowers or assumed independent positions per Non-Aligned Movement interventions. In this context, then, Israel as a "developing country" becomes an unrelenting major actor on the African continent. This scenario introduces another category "between the global North and the global South that complicates existing narratives of development and directs attention to the diverse social and political stakes that undergirded north-south exchanges" (3). Architecture, therefore, in the estimation of Levin, becomes a discipline that offers an unassailable possibility for the exploration of this complicated historical phenomenon. Israel, in these endeavors, developed a self-fashioned geopolitical position in its dealings with African governments, structuring its various aid offers as cooperation given their perceived shared historical experiences. All these things happened amid the subtle facilitation of Israeli interests and avowed national ideologies, both of which hardly ruled out nuanced occurrences and cases of inconsistences as well as contradictions. According to Levin, the epistemological framework for the Israeli approach to Africa hinged on Theodor Herzl's 1902 utopian novel, Altneuland. The imagined forms of knowledge production in this novel utilized the Jewish colonial experience that would prove beneficial to the [End Page 216] African continent. To this end, then, "Herzl, the visionary of political Zionism, shifted the center of colonial knowledge production from European metropoles to the Jewish settlements in Palestine" (13). At best, in application to the African continent, this knowledge comprised "labor-pioneer … and concrete in the harsh conditions of the field" (13). In putting this book together, Levin develops a conceptual framework of development theater explains the dramatization of aid among donor and recipient countries and upholds the role of what she calls architectural modernism. All these ideas are beautifully developed in five highly informative chapters with an introduction and a postscript as well as copious endnotes to boot. Chapter 1 is set in Sierra Leone, where an Israeli father–son architectural team relied on the experience of designing and building the Knesset to do the same for the parliament of this African country. As the local media highlighted the visibility of the project and the performance of labor, it equally emphasized the entire process as well as the agency of the citizenry. Aryeh Doudai's national urbanization plan, again for Sierra Leone, takes center stage in chapter 2. In this project, his redefinition of the entire country in identifying potential future urban centers in its interior, also an idea...

Egidio Foscarari—Giovanni Morone: Carteggio durante l'ultima fase del Concilio di Trento (1561–1563) ed. by Matteo Al Kalak (review)

Reviewed by: Egidio Foscarari—Giovanni Morone: Carteggio durante l'ultima fase del Concilio di Trento (1561–1563) ed. by Matteo Al Kalak Paul V. Murphy Egidio Foscarari—Giovanni Morone: Carteggio durante l'ultima fase del Concilio di Trento (1561–1563). Edited by Matteo Al Kalak. (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2018. Pp. 267. €64,00. ISBN: 9783402105276). For more than a century, historians of the Council of Trent have sought to overcome stark and often cliched judgements on the council born in a more sectarian era through examination of the substantial documentation left behind by participants in the form of letters and diaries. This has allowed for greater nuance in judgements on the Council of Trent. Matteo Al Kalak has made a significant contribution to this work. His recent biography of Bishop Egidio Foscarari, Il riformatore dimenticato: Egidio Foscarari tra Inquisizione, concilio, e governo pastorale (1512–1564) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016) shed light on the life and career of this Dominican bishop who succeeded Cardinal Giovanni Morone as bishop of Modena where he took a conciliatory position towards Modenese Protestants and was subsequently imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo by Pope Paul IV. At the council, Foscarari continued to seek reconciliation where possible not only between the emperor and the pope but between Protestants and the Catholic Church. Al Kalak has since edited and published Egidio Foscarari—Giovanni Morone: Carteggio durante l'ultima fase del Concilio di Trento (1561–1563), a valuable collection of the correspondence between Foscarari and his patron Morone during the final phase of the Council. These 133 letters, all but three of them from Foscarari, show the efforts made by the two to find practical means to obtain agreement not only between the often polarized Catholic factions at the Council but even in the hope of bringing some Protestants on board. Foscarari's efforts at conciliation are seen on three principal issues. One concerned whether the renewed meetings of the council in 1561 should be considered a continuation of the previous sessions and therefore prohibited review of previously decided issues. The Bull of convocation makes it clear that the pope considered it a continuation of the earlier sessions. Nevertheless, Foscarari sought middle ground by suggesting that flexibility as to the interpretation of the previously agreed upon decrees would allow for the possible reconciliation of at least some Protestants. Foscarari wanted similar room for maneuver regarding the Index of Prohibited Books of Pope Paul IV. If a complete retraction of it were not possible, in Al-Kalak's terms, they should propose "corrective measures that worked either [End Page 409] by moderating excessively severe prohibitions or by interpreting existing provisions in an accommodating key with respect to the requests of the Protestant reformers." (p. 11) Foscarari took a similarly flexible position on emending the text of the Bible for publication. If Foscarari and Morone found common ground on many issues, they came to strong disagreement on the issue that nearly wrecked the council, the residence of bishops, and whether that obligation was understood as according to jus divinum and therefore not open to exemptions. Foscarari strongly supported the jus divinum interpretation as necessary for a real reform of the clergy, a position rejected by Morone. This correspondence not only sheds light on the debates at the final sessions of the Council of Trent but also brings new issues into focus regarding these two well-known figures. The letters reveal Foscarari to have remained largely faithful to the path of reform he had followed from the time he became bishop of Modena, thus illustrating a great deal of continuity with an earlier generation of Italian reform. The letters raise questions about Morone, in contrast, as one who in the end opted for positions, on the residence of bishops in particular, that stood in contrast with those of Foscarari and a number of his earlier defenders. Al Kalak suggests that as one who had only recently been rehabilitated by Pope Pius IV after his imprisonment at the hands of Paul IV, Morone not only wanted to see the council come to a successful conclusion but also may have continued to feel vulnerable to the suspicions of some in the Roman...

Assessment of local climate strategies in Hungarian cities

Climate change is a critical challenge for cities, so urban communities are increasingly responsible for climate protection. Hungarian cities started thinking and acting to reduce their GHG emission and carbon footprint in the late 2000s. Thanks to the increasing focus on environmental issues and the European Green Deal, this process received a new impulse after 2018. In our research, we analyzed and compared the local climate strategies (LCSs) of 14 cities by scoring method to explore their goals and planned actions. In addition, we assessed the commitment of local governments and conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with city officials and experts to further highlight the challenges of climate protection. Findings reveal that the mandated climate planning process and the dependence on EU funds negatively impact the quality of the LCSs, with features and practices such as reverse mainstreaming and minimal room for maneuvering to make efficient climate actions at the local level. The common features of LCSs are the high degree of uniformity, the lack of local innovation, and in many cases, the lack of accurate detail that makes it doubtful that they can adequately fulfill their intended role. Instead, they create the possibility of drawing financial resources from the EU.

The EU's strategic autonomy in times of politicisation of international trade: The future of commission accountability

AbstractTrade relations face unprecedented challenges, which has led to an increased politicisation and contestation of trade rules. In response, the EU has changed its trade policy under the motto ‘Open Strategic Autonomy’ towards a more assertive policy. The EU seeks to significantly expand its room of manoeuvre and to gain more autonomy by strengthening the enforcement of its trade rights and by ensuring more effectively, including unilaterally, a level playing field. This reorientation engenders several new or amended trade policy instruments, but meets with reservations as the renewed politicisation of EU trade policy will have internal consequences and raise demands for more democratic accountability of the European Commission. The new policy instruments will enlarge its leeway in trade policy. The future of the EU's multilateral, rule‐ instead of power‐oriented political stance becomes unclear, which might undermine its negotiation position in WTO reform and collide with the EU's respect for international law. The tensions of the EU's new hybrid approach with its international commitments even more fuel demands for increased accountability of the Commission as a safeguard against employing the new powers for protectionism and disrespect to international law. The contribution analyses the need for increased Commission accountability in the redirected trade policy.

Bridgeheads of EU border externalisation? NGOs/CSOs and migration in Libya

This paper analyses the work carried out by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society organisations (CSOs) in Libya from 2009 to 2020 to shed light on its ambivalent relationship to the EU externalisation of migration and border management. While also looking at Libyan organisations, and at initiatives such as EU-funded professionalisation projects, which aim to co-opt the nascent local civil society into the EU border externalisation mechanism, the paper largely focuses on international NGOs, with specific attention being paid to the Italian NGO CIR. The paper shows that even in the difficult Libyan context there is some potential for NGOs/CSOs to radically and effectively oppose EU externalisation, or at least try to do so through activities such as public information and advocacy. However, in a context in which migrants are systematically exposed to a wide range of abuses, and foreign or foreign-funded actors are seen with suspicion, NGOs/CSOs have limited room for manoeuvre. In fact, they mostly end up filling the gaps of the local migration and border management system on behalf of their (European) donors, thus supporting the smooth operation of externalised border management. This is also visible in the way NGOs/CSOs address human rights, interact with donors and local authorities, and perpetuate dichotomies and categorisations that support migration containment policies.